Greek Memories

"Compton Mackenzie was a humorous novelist and enormously prolific Scottish writer as well as being a public man of affairs. He had already achieved a reputation as a novelist just before the First World War. But during the war he joins the Navy and goes to serve in Naval Intelligence in Greece after being invalided out of front line work. He was taken on by the forerunner of MI6 – then known as MI1c. It was run by a wonderful man called Mansfield Cumming, who hired Mackenzie to run his Greek operation, which was primarily to gather intelligence about the political situation in Greece, which was neutral at the time. The Germans were backing the Turks at this stage so there was a lot of anti-British activity in the Aegean Sea, which is where Mackenzie was based. He does very well and gathers a lot of information from 1915-1917. He was sending back these witty reports, sometimes in blank verse, which Cumming rather liked but others rated as too light-hearted. Yes, when it was published in 1932 it was almost immediately withdrawn and he was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. It was one of the first sensational memoirs of a former spy, revealing details of his Secret Service. But actually he didn’t divulge very much at all. He revealed that the head of the Secret Service used a single initial C and that he wrote in green ink! And that is still the case today. He also named a number of people who worked for him, and that is what got the organisation so rattled because they don’t like people telling tales out of school. MI6 is an extremely secretive organisation; the people who work for it are secret. But Mackenzie said, look, this is 1932, and it is 15 or 16 years since I was doing this, so no damage has been done. But the organisation thought very differently. They didn’t like the principle of revealing names. That is precisely it. Mackenzie’s book was the first high-level manifestation of a continuing problem for the Secret Services. There are people going off track and trying to exploit their time in the Service for private gain and self-publicity. The trial when it came had its humorous aspects. Mackenzie got someone from the Foreign Office to say he didn’t think there were very many secrets revealed at all. The same thing happened with the Spycatcher trial in 1986 when the government ended up with egg on their faces, looking stupid by pursuing secrecy for secrecy’s sake. There is a balance that needs to be struck. And of course MI6 didn’t itself exist publicly until 1994. That is 80-plus years into its life. If you had asked someone in 1993, ‘Does it exist?’ they would say, ‘I can neither confirm or deny that’, which was – and is – manifestly absurd. Compton Mackenzie made great play in his memoirs on this absurdity and got his revenge after the trial by going on to write a satire about the situation in a novel called Water on the Brain . It described a very secret department of government, which worked in a building which was to become an insane asylum for civil servants sent mad in the service of their country, which is a good read."